“We’ve been spying on her ever since you left,” said Samm, “trying to stay one step ahead. She’s looking for you everywhere—the entire Long Island invasion is a last-ditch effort to find you and finish her experiments.”

“But how can she not know what I am?” asked Kira.

“Dr. Morgan is convinced that the secret behind our expiration date has something to do with you,” said Samm. “She’s still experimenting on humans, but her main focus is on two things: She wants to find you, and she wants to find the Trust.”

“You mean the rest of the Trust,” said Kira. Samm frowned, confused, and Kira explained. “Dr. Morgan is part of the Trust,” she said. “McKenna Morgan, specialist in bionanotechnology and human augmentation. She worked at ParaGen for years—I’ve got her whole résumé upstairs.”

Samm frowned. “How could she work at ParaGen if she’s part of the Trust? They’re not human scientists, they’re Partial generals and doctors who stepped up to lead us after the Break.”

Kira pursed her lips. “We’d better go upstairs.”

Afa was gone, leaving nothing but a smoking hole in the wall of the eighth floor: He’d used a small shaped charge to blow a hole between this building and the adjacent one, and slipped out while Kira was fighting Heron and Samm. He’d taken his backpack, but he hadn’t blown them up, and Kira knew he’d come back soon—he couldn’t stand to leave his library for long. In the meantime she led Samm and Heron to one of the records rooms, a former sound booth with a wide table and a ring of co-opted filing cabinets. This was where Afa stored his most extensive, most valuable records about the inner workings of ParaGen, and Kira had been going through them steadily during her breaks from the radio. As the Partials grew more canny, and the human army retreated away from effective radio range, those breaks were getting longer and more plentiful.

“This one first,” said Kira, hanging her oil lantern on a hook in the wall, and setting out a printed sheet from an old company email. “It’s a meeting request from the financial manager to the top staff of the ParaGen labs. This part at the top is a list of email addresses—it’s like code names, kind of, that the computer system used to deliver messages to people.”

“We’re familiar with email,” said Heron.

“Hey,” said Kira, “this technology is all new to me—I was five when you blew everything up, remember?”

“Go on,” said Samm.